Originally published in 1903, at the height of the "trust era," Professor Meade of the then Wharton School of Finance and Economy, examined the trust question from the viewpoint of financial management. In the preface he says: "Recent discussions of the trust question have shown the existence among persons of every shade of opinion of a conviction that serious blunders have been made in the organization and financial management of many industrial combinations, and that the result of these blunders is a condition of overcapitalization which is a menace to general business security. Opinions may differ as to the evils of monopoly prices, and the undue advantages in competition which are alleged to have arisen out of the combination movement, but, apparently, there is a general assent to the proposition that there is in the United States a large mass of speculative securities behind which is no guarantee of earning power sufficient to maintain their value under ordinary fluctuations of business prosperity. This condition, it is held, involves serious danger to every legitimate business interest. It is proposed in this volume to examine the grounds upon which this opinion is based, and to determine whether or not it is warranted by the known facts of trust capitalization and management." Meade's work was cited several times in the 1904 publication of The Theory of Business Enterprise by Thorstein Veblen.